Traveling Transition Time Again – Update on Lance XRV 8 Dec 2024
As I mentioned at the end of the previous post, both Christine and I have been traveling the past few weeks. Christine flew out to Florida for two weeks for some much needed Gramma time with our now 9 year old Grandson Liam and some time with her best friends and family in the Fort Lauderdale area. And I flew over to Tucson to pick up the new to us travel trailer and pickup truck combo we recently purchased to provide living accommodations on our new 10 acre property near Searchlight Nevada.
So this will just be a quick update on what little work I have been able to get done on Lance and a brief summary of what’s been happening as we start making the transition from our rental here in Klamath Falls down to our new Southern Home Base just north of Searchlight.
This sat view (click any photo to enlarge) of the southern arrowhead tip of the state of Nevada (NV state border is dotted red/white line) might help show you where we’re headed. Up in the top middle you can see the sprawling Las Vegas/Henderson area and Hwy 95 running parallel to the Colorado river heading South to the Laughlin/Bullhead City area at the bottom.
Our new place is where you see the Green circle with the white flag about half way down Hwy 95. 
Zooming in a bit you can see the turn off of Hwy 95 onto the dirt road running East in the middle of this sat view over to our place with the Green Flag. That distance is about 1.5 miles/2.4km
Zooming in on that Green Flag, here’s the birds eye view of our 10 acres where you can see the two white shipping containers that came with the property. (the boat was just being stored there)
For the curious amongst you, all the black dots you see in these sat photos are Joshua Trees so we are literally living in a Joshua Tree forest!
(photo thanks to By Bernard Gagnon)
Meanwhile, IRL In Real Life, here is where I put our Lance home on wheels #2 (too funny right?!) after the drive from Tucson. The truck is a 2006 Toyota Tundra SR5 and the trailer is a 2012 Lance model 2385. For more details on Lance #2 the travel tailer, see the previous post for photos and layout.
And yes, other than several hundred Joshua Trees that is ALL there is so far on our 10 acres. Many of you have sent a LOT of questions as to just what we are going to do for little things like power and water so here’s the deal on that. Having lived in boats as we’ve been traveling the world for the past few decades, we are accustomed to being eXtremely self sufficient and this newest adventure will be no different.
Part of the attraction and what made this property such a Goldilocks find for us was those two new containers AND what was inside of them. Here is a shot of the container on the Left where you can see these 16 new solar panels. These are 305 Watt PV panels which I will soon be setting up outside to give us a total of almost 5 kilowatts of potential solar power. 
OK, so those solar panels capture the sun’s energy, but then what Wayne??
Well, the other parts of this puzzle which I need to build our completely off grid power station.are inside this trio of boxes that arrived here in Klamath Falls a few days ago. 
Inside the wood box on the bottom is 128kg/282 lbs. of big beautiful battery power! 14.3 kWh (kilo Watt hours) to be exact, which comes in the form of our new EG4 wall mount 48V 280Ah lithium Iron battery. Being in very sunny southern Nevada those solar panels should provide more than enough power to keep this battery fully charged every day. 
The two cardboard boxes above that contain this equally beautiful and important EG4 600XP split phase off-grid inverter/charger which handles two critical tasks. First it takes all the 48 volt DC power from the battery and inverts it into 120 and 240 Volts AC and then there are two MPPT controllers inside which regulates all the DC power from the solar panels to charge the batteries. Together this will provide us with all our electrical power we need in the trailer and the workshop to power everything from air conditioner to induction cooktop to welder.
OK, so that looks after electrical needs, but what about water you ask? 
The solution to that also lies in the containers in the form of these IBC Totes (Intermediate Bulk Container) You may have noticed this one beside the 16 solar panels shown earlier. 
Then there are four more ICB totes stacked up at the end of the other container. There is a LOT of other equipment in these containers and I did a quick inventory of them after I took the trailer there and I marked this photo with the # of liters of fresh water in each one. These ICB totes each hold about 330 USG/ 1250 Liters and so when all four are full that gives us about 1320 USG/5000L which should give us about a year’s worth of water.
What about that fifth empty one in the other container you ask? Well, they are pretty light when empty and so we load that into the truck bed and head into town and fill it up with the “city water” from Searchlight which is just 2 miles south on Hwy 95. Bring that back and use an electric water pump to fill the IBC totes in the other container. Rinse and repeat once a year or so and we’ve got all the fresh water we need. 
Our longer term solution is that we will use rain water catchment when I create a big workshop by moving the two shipping containers to be about 40 feet apart and build a large gable roof to span them a bit like this illustration. 
I’ll do the roof a bit different to have clerestory windows on the peak but I’ll leave that for another post in the future.
This large roof surface area will catch a LOT of rainwater that will be diverted into storage tanks in the ground.
So that’s the near and long term plan for water. Stay tuned here for more on all that as it gets built.
Back to Lance #1 and Klamath Falls, the other big beautiful shipment we recently receives is THIS! Can you guess what’s inside? 
……… Gold start to those who guessed it is the fridge/freezer combo for the galley in Lance. 
Left side is a 1.8 cubic foot freezer and 5.2 cu ft of fridge on the right with plenty of shelves, drawers and door space so should serve us well. 
I’ve been busy getting Lance ready for the 800 mile drive down to Searchlight and needed to get all the lights on the back of him working. I needed some wire for this and as you may recall from previous posts, I removed all the many miles of original wiring from inside the ambulance box and so with the help of my two assistants I tackled the sorting and spooling of all this wire. This is Zoe with her “cone of shame” after her spay surgery. 
Together the three of us were able to convert this into ……………….. 
……..… this and another tubful. 
Twas a wee bit chilly doing this work for as the seasonal song goes ………. “the weather outside what frightful!”. But I’ve got a little electric heater when I’m working inside Lance and with all his insulation it was doesn’t take much to keep it all nice and toasty in there.
The snow doesn’t last too long before melting away but the temps have been down below freezing at nights and some days for the past few weeks and so on that wintery note I will bid you all adieu and close out with what is likely to be the last blog this year. Hard to believe that it was just over one year ago (October 12th, 2023) that we found ourselves on the dock in Portsmouth VA standing beside our beloved Mobiüs for the last time and beginning the transition from a life eXploring the world by sea to now doing so by land. So quite fitting that as 2024 ticks over into 2025, we are now making the newest transition to Lance and our Southern Home Base.
Hoping all of you enjoy the upcoming holiday season and sending our sincere thanks for all the time you’ve spent following along with our adventures this past year or years. Look forward to sharing more with you as the adventures continue into the new year.
Wayne & Christine
Zoe & Razz
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